Age discrimination in employment has considerably lessened the economic and employment opportunities of middle aged and older job seekers. Inadequate job training represents a barrier confronting the older job seeker and is a major aspect of age discrimination. This is especially a problem today given changes in job demands (a shift in emphasis from physical skills to information processing skills) and the steady influx of complex technology into many occupations. Currently no efforts have been directed at developing training packages for computer oriented tasks which address the needs of older learners. The intent of this research is to begin to probe this issue. Specifically, this research will evaluate the effectiveness of standard training procedures for word processing tasks for older learners. A 3x3 completely randomized factorial design will be used for this study. The factors are age with three levels (25-39 years old, 40-54 years old and 44-70 years old) and type of training with three levels (on-line, document-based and instructor-based). A total of 135 healthy, ambulatory female subjects will participate in the study (15 per cell). Subjects will receive 4 hours of training in the basic functions and operations of word processing. The training will vary according to how the information is presented: on-line (info. presented on computer), a self training manual or lecture format. Subjects will then be asked to perform standard word processing tasks. The effectiveness of the various training strategies will be assessed by measuring subjects' performance on the word processing tasks (speed and errors) and by analysis of information provided on a self-report instrument. The results of this study will provide information regarding the suitability of available word processing training techniques for older persons and also provide information needed for the development of age-related word processing training packages and word processing software. In addition this study will implicitly examine older workers' learning needs for other computer based tasks.